Experts urge people to be mindful while eating

If you’re chowing down while reading this, you may be sabotaging your efforts at healthy eating.

According to a study by the Institute of Psychology, Health and Society at the University of Liverpool in England, people who eat while they’re concentrating on something other than their food tend to feel less full — leading them to eat even more.

The idea behind the research was that if people are distracted while eating — whether by television, cellphone or work — their attention was not on the texture and taste of their food.

Lead researcher Eric Robinson said the study shows that weight gain may not necessarily be caused by television or similar distractions turning people into couch potatoes but by the fact that people aren’t mindful of how much they’re eating.

Martha Smallwood, who teaches nutrition classes at Abilene Christian University, said she wasn’t familiar with Robinson’s study, but it appeared to be similar to work done by Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. Wansink came up with the term “mindless eating” to describe consumption based on factors other than hunger.

“We just eat a plateful,” Smallwood said. “(Wansink) found that if we used smaller plates, we would eat less.”

Wansink’s research showed that people take their eating cues from things like the size of the plate or bulk purchases, and that by using a 10-inch plate rather than a 12-inch plate, people would eat less. He also found that half of food bought in bulk was gone within six days.

In other words, if it’s available, we’ll eat it, regardless of whether we’re actually hungry or not. Effective dieting, however, relies on making relatively small changes in our eating habits.

“The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on,” Wansink wrote in his book, “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.”

Smallwood said that by making conscious choices, such as designating parts of your plate for certain foods or by taking longer for a meal, you’ll be forced to think more about the food you are eating and will be less likely to grab a bag of chips and sit on the couch to watch TV.

“It takes planning,” she said. “A meal is supposed to be a relaxed situation. But now we’re so busy, we just grab something. We’ve developed people who eat over the sink.”

Fewer of us, she said, have the luxury of an hour for lunch, which leads us to gulp down a meal while we’re taking care of something else.

Eating a smaller portion at lunch and snacking wisely later in the day could help, she said.